THE R.I.P MAN (2025)

3 stars

Reel2Reel Films. Digital. Out Now

The film opens fairly typically for a horror film with a young lady alone… she gets a weird phone message – R.I.P Abigail Freight with a graphic of a tooth. She checks outside thinking she heard something. Unbeknownst to her a bald man has managed to get into the house somehow – when she returns to her bedroom, she finds a pair of wind up chattering teeth on her bed with eyes. Odd!She is then attacked by the intruder, who stabs her, drags her downstairs and proceeds to drill out one of her teeth to take for himself (though how he achieves this with power tool he has is open to question). He is wearing a mouth guard which has RIP on it. We later learn our killer basically has no teeth so is harvesting them from his victims.

The story then introduces us to a bunch of college students – better known as possible victims – and also the seemingly incompetent police detectives investigating the case of the dental driller killer. Of course it isn’t long before our serial killer has grabbed more gnashers for his collection, whilst leaving toy teeth at the scene of the crime…

THE R.I.P. MAN is a great title for a horror movie and you have to admire director Jamie Langlands and scriptwriter Rhys Thompson for trying to create an original on-screen boogeyman within their limited budget of £20k. It is quite well shot and lit. Unfortunately, like most lower scale outings the acting varies and some of the dialogue is clunky. The pacing is lacklustre and could have done with tightening in the editing to speed things along a bit.

Having said that, Owen Llewellyn looks suitably manic in the role of our serial killer – even if he looks a bit like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family. We know from the start he is the perpetrator, but don’t initially know why he has a fixation with extracting teeth in a bloody manner. In the end it’s all a touch contrived.

Steve Kirkham